NOT REALLY MENTAL

A May 2 editorial urged passage of the health-care bill now in Congress. In my opinion, now is the time to make changes in the way some "mental illness" is insured.

Most insurance companies do not write out specific language in their policies for brain illnesses. They are overgeneralized as mental illnesses. This often includes brain disorders that result from an accident, such as an auto accident, or illness, such as a stroke. If a psychiatrist is needed to prescribe medication to chemically alter brain activity after the accident, the medication follow-up would not be covered as any other physical illness. In other words, insurance would pay very little. The same applies for any physical or occupa-tional rehabilitation needed.

Further, recent advances in neuroscience and tissue-imaging have increased our knowledge of how the brain works in illnesses called schizophrenia and mood disorder. We now know that they have a strong inherited component, involve structural abnormalities and chemical imbalances in different groups of brain cells. These are all physical or organic deficiencies, not environ-mentally caused trauma. To treat these illnesses differently than other physical illness is to be arbitrary in care.

If the advances in organ-transplant medicine and the use of rejection medication were treated the same way, insurance companies would say they won't pay for these procedures because they are not standard medicine.

The result is that families can go bankrupt trying to provide care until their loved ones are declared chronically disabled and put on Medicare or Medicaid.

If brain disorders were treated as the physical disorders they are, then a course of treatment allowing accurate diagnosis, medication use, physical therapy and occupational therapy would result. Then many of these people could be rehabilitated and make a contribution to society.